Deb Matthews acknowledges she didn’t read an audit she received almost a year ago showing ORNGE founder Dr. Chris Mazza was raking in millions of dollars running the provincially-funded air ambulance service.

Health Minister Deb Matthews acknowledges she didn’t read an audit she received almost a year ago showing ORNGE founder Dr. Chris Mazza was raking in millions of dollars running the provincially-funded air ambulance service.

That admission stunned opposition critics, who for years now have accused Matthews of being asleep at the switch while Mazza, who is no longer with ORNGE, made millions in taxpayers’ money.

Matthews finally read about it Monday, when the Toronto Star revealed that over a six-year period Mazza was paid $9.3 million, a far cry from what was posted publicly on the Public Sector Disclosure list.

“When the final audit report came it was sent directly to the OPP. I did not read that final audit report,” she told reporters, adding that neither did the deputy health minister.

In December, 2011, the government sent a forensic audit team into ORNGE to probe allegations of financial irregularities. An interim report summary provided to the ministry and the Matthews office in February 2012 was referred to the OPP, a minister’s spokesperson said in an email.

For example, according to the so-called sunshine list, Mazza was paid $284,999 in 2006 but the internal ORNGE accounting documents reveal it was actually $869,354.

An Ontario Provincial Police investigation is ongoing into a consulting deal that saw one of Mazza’s companies receive $4.7 million from an Italian firm that sold 12 helicopters to ORNGE. An additional $2 million was to have been paid, but that part of the deal did not go through.

Among other things, Matthews also accused Mazza and the then-ORNGE board of directors of pulling the wool over her eyes, acknowledging she was far too trusting.

“There was a clear abuse of trust by Mazza and by that board . . . that’s why he no longer has a job, that’s why the entire board was fired and has been replaced by a volunteer board,” she told reporters at Queen’s Park.

“I am honestly disgusted by the more I learn about what this man and his board did. We trust people in our health-care system to do the best they can for patients and to get the best value for money. When there is an abuse of that trust I am incensed.”

Asked why she and the government didn’t pick up on these so-called abuses, Matthews said “I think I was” too trusting of Mazza, who she acknowledged outsmarted her and the health ministry.

“My job is to fix the problem when I became aware of it and I have done that,” she said, adding earlier in the legislature that ORNGE is now subject to freedom-of-information law and executive salaries are posted online.

Tory MPP Frank Klees (Newmarket—Aurora) accused the Liberal government of deliberately sitting on the audit information, and in particular withholding it from a legislative committee probing the ORNGE debacle.

“There are really two people whose credibility has to be questioned here. Clearly one is Chris Mazza and the other is the minister of health. Today . . . I find out that, in fact, the audit results were given to her and she didn’t even bother to look at them,” he told reporters.

Klees also disputed Matthews’ claim that Mazza’s real income was not available because of the “web” of companies created.

“That’s not true. The story we have now is that these funds that were not reported on the public sector salary disclosure list were actually paid to Mazza before the incorporation of the web of companies. So what we’ve got here as evidence again is the fact that this minister doesn’t understand the file,” he said.

Klees said Mazza “has no business collecting one more nickel from the ministry of health and yet he is practicing in the emergency ward in Thunder Bay.”

Klees also called on the provincial auditor general to audit the public salary disclosure system “because I can’t believe that . . . Dr. Chris Mazza’s salary is the only one that hasn’t been fully disclosed.”

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